Tune Yards

Mmmmm bass

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqBF38Pht10

might cheer you up

I can’t imagine if this would work in real life

you’re allowed to make a scene!

Everything is okay… http://www.youtube.com/user/cveitch
http://www.cveitch.org/

i watched a handful of these videos and to be honest after a while it gets a bit annoying, but this one did give me a giggle

House Jam in the Morning

Sorts me out for the day

It’s Alright

a bit like being down the pub, even though for a lot of it you’ll probably have no idea what or who they are talking about

My New Pink Button Rage

“My New Pink Button (tm) is a temporary dye to restore the youthful pink color back to your labia.”

Why?

“There is no other product like it.”

Because there is no need for it.

“This patent pending formula was designed by a female certified Paramedical Esthetician after she discovered her own genital color loss.”

OH. Well that’s okay then, it was made by a woman, for women, after she squatted over a mirror and discovered she was human.

“While looking online for a solution she discovered thousands of other women asking the same questions regarding their color loss.”

Why not talk about how it’s okay to have colour loss/change instead? It should be a pointless thing to worry about. You’re a human being with skin that responds to age. Surely this is a wonderful thing? Your body is developing as it should, it changed when you were 11, its changing now, entering a new time of womanhood, a hopefully wiser more settled time, you’re not a washed up old crone. Christ I sound so patronising, but it just makes me angry.

Instead of reassuring women about themselves,  My New Pink Button dreams up a product to prop up another insecurity. This is rather than make the insecurity go away by positively reinforcing ideas about their bodies. We don’t have to look prepubescent. This dye will exasperate that problem, leading people to become reliant on another external product to make them feel good about themselves and be part of an industry that destroys their self esteem yet again.

“After countless searches revealing no solution available and a discussion with her own gynaecologist she decided to create her own. Now there is a solution!”

The wrong solution.  Its okay! Every single body is unique. Every single body is beautiful in some way. You don’t need to change it or become focused on one area and how its not perfect. What’s perfect is when something isn’t perfect. Its interesting, its intriguing, it tells a story, it means you are who you are, you are recognizable, you are in no way in need of buying a chemical to make your intimate areas better. They are already as ultimate as they can be.

I’m not bringing surgical procedures into this as I have done even less research into them as I have into this. I know there are lots of women who worry about the size of their vagina, as men worry about the size of their penis. EVERYBODY WORRIES. I’m not big or clever enough to take that topic on when others would do a better job of it.

The whole thing just depresses me. We need to stop squashing ourselves into one image. Where is the fun in that? What’s the point? What would the world be like if everything was the same shape? And if everything smelled the same? And tasted the same? The same colour? God I think I’d probably try and eat my own hands out of boredom.

The dye comes in four colours and I could list them but its crap, suffice to say its meaningless.

There are some testimonials on the site, who knows if they are real. A few of them mention how they were embarrassed to talk about the change in their vagina with their friends.  I think that’s part of the problem, women need to be able to share what’s going on with their bodies in order to support each other through changes.   If we all sat down and talked openly about feeling insecure, others would follow suit and we would learn to rely on other women for a self esteem boost, rather than a product or an industry.   We would learn to ask someone older and wiser for help and it would be given.

Clarissa Pinkola Éstes describes the stage of an older woman’s life as “the age of giving courage to others”. This is what we should look forward to, not embarrassment.

Sharing knowledge or experiences brings us together, it goes some way towards banishing the competition element between women that can be so destructive to our confidence. Everyone everyone everyone has something they hate about their bodies. We don’t need to be better than the others, we need to be told its okay by each other, not just by men and not just by an advert in a magazine. Then maybe we could stop trying to fit ourselves to an ideal image; that tasteless shapeless scentless drone of bland. There is endless variation and in that there is endless beauty.

my boring life

today was boxing day. i spent it mainly indoors. going to sleep at 4am meant i slept through to midday and then the three dogs sharing my bed woke me up to let them out.  i thought i’d better get dressed too just in case my mum came back and found me still half asleep. i opened the curtains too because thats another thing that really pisses her off.

after dressing myself the dogs became excited and started tearing round the house so i took em over the road for a run around the field.  one of them rolled in some kind of shit. i think it was fox.  upon returnign to the house with each dog strangling itself on its own lead, i tried the back door but it was locked.  i assumed the front one would be too because we never really use it. i looked round the house and discovered i’d left my bedroom window open. luckily as this is a  bungalow climbing in should be easy.  all three dogs looked on as i scrambled up the wall and tried to shimmy my arse over the edge. i wear too many layers and my belt was far too chunky for this to be easy, and i had to force myself in backwards and landed backwards on my head in my room. ive often seen people climb through windows in tv programs and think i could do a more graceful job, but you can’t, honestly.  i later told my mum and she said she never locks the front door.

i spent the rest of the day figuring out how to get down to south wales, washing the dog, watching videos about how much stuff we buy and how bad it is, re-arranging my flickr site and gathering ingrediants for cookies i never got round to making.  when my mum got back from work i made her tea and got the dinner on.  then we settled down to some Hamlet with David Tenant.  He’s really good and I got pretty caught up with the language and how differently thoughts feelings and things in general were expressed, slightly more laterally, more vivid, emotive. i know shakespear is supposed to be all those things but still.  having said that after 3 hours i just wanted Hamlet to get on and kill his fucking Uncle and stop going on about it.  thats the eastenders fan in me talking.

i then drove down to my brothers caravan – dog in tow – to watch said program on bbc3. i stayed for a bit afterwards and his mate matt came down.  we watched shooting stars but he’d never seen it, incredible. he is only 20. he’d brought some bill hicks with him so we had a go at that and i knew a lot of the material even though ive never seen any of his shows, just becasue people quote him all the time.  i enjoy his manner, apart from all the times he says “‘kay? ‘kay.”

i could tell the dog was getting passively stoned and a little ratty because he kept going to hide under my brothers bed clothes, so we left.  he stared at me the whole way home from his position in the passenger seat, that is until we turned into my mums estate whereupon he jumped up and put his paws on the dashboard, looking around outside the car expectantly. i find it amazing how they suddnely know home is close by.

Roy Granger

Roy Granger giving you an insight into his day to day life; bumping into missing celebrities, kidnapping cats, talking to birds and having a bit of a moan

for more http://www.youtube.com/user/roygranger#p/u/7/MPim4tt6DXo

the story of stuff

THE MASS OF CHRIST

Christmas 2009

I’ll start with a list of the things I got.

In November, a sewing machine

Today, a book to go with the sewing machine, on how to use it. Including patterns for such things as a tissue box cover, for all those tissue boxes I always buy; a stool cover for all the stools that are apparently crying out for covering, which is what the book actually claims; how to ruffle necklines, how to add a lace underlay to a v-neck t-shirt and I’ve not found it yet but I’m pretty sure there will be a pattern in there somewhere for how to make a toilet roll cover.

A Kaki King album called Legs to Make us Longer

A capo

A pair of hideous earrings {Sorry Mum} they’ve already made my ears sore but its the thought that counts.

An amazing jumper, yellow and orange striped chunky woolen hooded number.

Patsy Palmer’s autobiography – Brilliant

My mums got a tree up in the bungalow which is nice. The sad thing is that there’s only one lowly Christmas cracker sitting in its plastic pine branches, I know for a fact that this cracker is from a box we had over 6 years ago. When we were little crackers were so exciting, but with the demise of our family so went the enthusiasm for pulling them. It seemed increasingly inappropriate each year to force ourselves into the action of sharing a cracker pulling with each other, you can’t have a somber cracker pull, it demands frivolity; you don’t want to wear a hat when you feel painfully self conscious and aware of no one looking each other in the eye, whats the point in the hat if you can’t laugh at each other! and you can’t tell the joke when no one is talking to each other and you can’t argue over the toy when no one is comfortable enough to express mild competition. I didn’t notice this cracker being there last year but I hope to god it’s not there next year. Maybe I’ll go and pull it with myself, that sounds dirty.

It’s not quite so bad now my dad’s not around. The tension would start around 10am when he opened the first bottle of wine and my mum would complain about it being too early. We always opened presents after breakfast – traditionally a boiled egg. My dad usually got lots of flamboyant crap off the internet for my brother and me, like a version of Russian roulette with chocolates containing one deadly chili instead of a gun and bullet, or a miniature digital camera you could keep on your keyring that never worked. My mum would get pretty boring stuff from him, one year she just got a toweling dressing gown, another year he’d stretched to an ironing board cover! Seriously. After this was over it was time for my dad to go into the kitchen and start making the trifle for dessert, massively over the top in size and content, always really nice, but it was an obvious diversion from anything family orientated. While he was doing this everyone else would retreat to their own rooms to watch their own tellies or leaf through the pile of stuff they had. Then it was dinner time; one glass of fizzy wine each, untouched cracker box, telly on in the background so we wouldn’t have to talk but the food was always amazing. They did try bless em.

Today the better family atmosphere made up for the less amazing food.

There were 10 of us in all. Me, my brother Ricky and mum. Aunty Shona, Uncle Chris and my Nan. My cousin Peter {a year younger than me} his wife Denis and their two kids Jamie 5 and Fiona 3 or 4.

We got there at 1, I’d already had a couple of hefty brandy’s back at my mums, much to her disapproval and then started on the red wine, getting me pissed pretty quickly due to the lack of any breakfast. I pretended to help Shona in the kitchen first by pouring her lots of wine and then by picking up and putting down various plates, lids and utensils whilst shoveling dry co-op mince pies in my mouth and spilling bits on the floor, so I’d have to crouch down and push the bits of pastry in the direction of the dogs nose. I bullied my brother into carving the turkey in a friendly drunken manner because Chris still wasn’t about. He’s quite shy so when he eventually came into the kitchen to give it a go and both blades fell off the electric carving knife he couldn’t take my highly amused cajoling and left the kitchen to go and have a spliff. I’m a great sister.

Chris disappeared to ice the Christmas cake at any given opportunity so he could get away from everyone, he seemed tired of everything and made none of his usual jokes,. He finally produced it after we’d all had loads of turkey and mashed potato. No one ate any and my aunty told him the cake looked German. I don’t know how a Christmas cake can look German but apparently its something to do with the formation of the icing on the top.

In fact my uncle didn’t too looked pleased with the presents I got him either; a pot of Gentleman’s Relish {Which is actually pretty expensive, but I nicked it from work anyway} and a pair of braces with pictures of men playing golf on them. How could he not be pleased?

My cousin has just moved to Wales from Germany because the social over there have stopped his benefits. The kids are quite adorable, but I don’t know what to say to children, and these ones only speak German. Fiona followed me round all afternoon chattering away but the only words I understood were Oma {grandma} and Hallo. I just replied with lots of enthusiastic Ja’s and she seemed okay with that and insisted on giving me chocolates she found on the floor, or my nans walking stick, or her smelly doll. Jamie played with his transformers and luckily didn’t require any interaction. Denis just sat wide eyed trying to follow the English. She seems nice but was totally shocked when halfway through dinner my brother did a massive fart. She looked up around the table with a surprised smile, trying to gage everyone else’s reactions, when she saw we were all giggling away my aunty turned to me and said that Denis has never even heard her own mother fart. Hilarious. I thought Germans loved joking about shit. My brother totally lapped this up and proceeded to fart even more. She’s got to learn sometime eh?

When I opened the present from my Nan I said thank you very much that’s lovely; she she craned her neck and asked me what it was… so I thanked my mum instead, even though I’m never going to want to sew a tissue box cover.

When we got back to my mums we all sat down to watch the Christmas Dr Who. I doodled most of the way through and produced a lovely little duck sitting in the middle of a strange eye. My mum started a conversation over the last 2 minutes of the program ruining the dramatic return of the Time Lords and spent the entire episode moaning about how loud the music was. As usual my brother spent the entire episode trying to predict what was going to happen and then started nagging me for a lift back to his place almost immediately after it’d finished. I tried to tell him I’d been drinking since midday but he was having none of it, so we left the house in a flurry of arguments to settle down to a dose of Eastenders by the hissing gas fire in his draughty caravan. It still freaks me out when I’ve had a couple of spliffs to hear branches scratching against the outside in the wind, its like nails down a blackboard. The caravan for me has a lingering sense of paranoia hanging over it from the days when we’d get stoned in there worrying about Mum or Dad coming out from the house to bang on the door. My brother actually started hearing my Dads voice shout at him in his head even when he wasn’t staying at home. Mind you, when ever my mum came down and my brother’d swing the caravan door open, wafting clouds of skunk out to the garden she would never notice. She thought he was just smoking roll-ups. That is until they found a make-shift pipe he’d made out of some old biro casing, they accused him of smoking crack!